Thursday, May 25, 2017

Twin Peaks' Mystery, David Bowie, Jim Morrison

Laura Palmer's murder is the case that sets off Twin Peaks and which brings Dale Cooper to the sleepy town drenched in mystery. Laura's soul still appears to be trapped in the Black Lodge, along with Cooper's. When we return to the Red Room, Laura Palmer sits in a chair opposite Agent Cooper. The Man from Another Place claps his hands, turns around, and says “Let’s rock.” He goes on to say many cryptic things, including, of Laura, “She’s filled with secrets.” Music begins to play— Badalamenti’s “Dance of the Dream Man”—while a strobe light flashes. Laura walks to Agent Cooper, kisses him on the lips, and whispers into his ear. Martha Nochimson links the strangeness of language in the Red Room with the pervasive sexual imagery: 'These comic sexual images involve speech that is materially distorted and gesture that is untranslatable into logos. In seeking knowledge, Cooper must immerse himself in plasticity, in tension—that is, in the tension between the masculine and the feminine.' Laura is so many women at once that whatever original subjectivity existed has disappeared, destroyed by the expectations placed upon her by the small town as the object-cause of their desire. In truth, there is no a real Laura—there is merely the homecoming queen and the mysterious woman in the Black Lodge. Laura has lost herself; as Todd McGowan states in The Impossible David Lynch (2007), “Her subjectivity is an emptiness that remains irreducible to any identity.” —"Dark Reflections: Fantasy and Duality in the work of David Lynch" (2014) by Nolan Boyd

Could David Bowie appear in the 'Twin Peaks' reboot? Anything is possible in a David Lynch production. A new article speculates on the admittedly unlikely possibility that David Bowie will appear in an upcoming episode of Showtime‘s Twin Peaks: The Return, a sequel to Lynch’s cult television series. Bowie had a small part in 1992’s prequel movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, as FBI agent Philip Jeffries. Despite the brevity of his time on-screen, Mashable notes that Jeffries has been mentioned on two of the four episodes of the new series that have aired to date, with intimations that the character could still be alive. In one scene towards the end of the second episode, Bob Cooper believes he’s talking to Jeffries, although his voice is distinctly different from the Southern accent Bowie used in Fire Walk With Me. The article notes that Lynch filmed the series between September 2015 and April 2016, putting Bowie’s January 2016 death in the middle of that timeframe. Actor Harry Goaz, who plays Deputy Andy Brennan, revealed last year that Bowie had been scheduled to spend a day on the set, but canceled it for an unknown reason. The author suggests that it’s possible that Bowie was too busy completing Blackstar and returned at another time to film his part. Source: diffuser.fm

Angie Bowie: ‘I didn’t care about David’s lovers as long as they realised I was the queen.’ Angie, just 19 when she first met David Bowie, got close to him after recognising his potential while she was working for Mercury Records. She was charmed despite knowing that he had cheated on former love Hermione Farthingale, the inspiration for Life on Mars, with Mary Finnigan. Angie says: 'We met when David was pretty much just starting out. I already knew he was a dirty dog because there had been Hermione and Mary and I’d only been around him a month or two.' Angie claimed she was caught up in a rock ’n’ roll love tangle when Mick Jagger tried to bed her. She said the Rolling Stones star, then sleeping with her pal Dana Gillespie, tried to seduce her at a hotel. His alleged failed bid was an attempt to pay back David for sleeping with Mick’s then-wife, Bianca Jagger. Angie says “I wasn’t particularly impressed or interested. I had one job and that was David.” Their marriage began to deteriorate after Bowie, who had dabbled with acid and smack, became hooked on cocaine. “I really didn’t care about anyone getting in my face with David as long as they realised I was the queen,” she says. “I thought, ‘Sure, flirt, do your thing. But guess what? I’m the queen bee, baby!’ I will remember David now as a passionate talent. The two of us, we set out to change the world with his music. And that’s what we did. ” Source: www.thetimes.co.uk

I see dissociation as the defining characteristic of our culture, a direction we've been heading in for the last few decades since the end of the 1960s. I am naming that we are living in the Age of Dissociation. The 1960s represented the greatest collective movement for love to save the world, the greatest collective effort for love to prevail—for association to prevail. That experiment failed spectacularly in its day, at least in terms of bringing forth a world based on basic similarity and connection among all members of the human family. Perhaps it was premature, a wishful fantasy, whose day has not yet come? That experiment was a reaction to the fear of the 1950s and early 60s, a fear we could imagine, especially in the more immediate aftermath of WWII, the Holocaust, and the psychically overwhelming actual use of nuclear weapons to attack Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Viewed from a collective perspective, these events were an attack by humanity on itself, a suicidal gesture of previously unseen proportions. Source: www.psychologytoday.com

As Jim Morrison’s political leanings toward the Living Theatre indicate, his philosophy was not necessarily incompatible with notions of the beneficial role of the state in society. In the 1960s both tended to be connected. “Rock is Dead” describes how Morrison’s childhood was transformed by rock music : “I used to be a boy in my home block / Used to feel alone then I heard some news / Bunch of cats got the rocking news / You know I love my rock n’ roll people.” Morrison was not able to cope with the apathy of his audience—it seems as if his attempts to “wake” them up from their collective submission did indeed fail. Around December 1969 Morrison told friends he was having a “nervous breakdown.” Culture was about to become ideologically idle in the next decades. Morrison in the poem “Latino Chrome” equates his sexuality with a union of forces—the act of combining his male perspective with feminine instinct and knowledge: What Morrison could have thought of as a female weakness is converted into a positive image, a celebration of humanity. There is a clear case in these lines: “Are you her / Do you look like that / How could you be when / No one ever could”. This is a “woman as muse” concept—sexuality reflecting a desire for perfection, in a sense of an “answer instead of a way.” Jim Morrison liked to cite Nietzsche's quote: "All great things must first wear monstrous and terrifying masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity." —"A Theatre of Perception: The Doors and The Sixties" (2016) by Mark Vanstone

Jim Morrison, a film school poet, could be all things to all people, like Marilyn Monroe, but how can an actor stay in character if he’s not actually Jim? Casting anyone to play Jim was just totally ridiculous to me. Oliver Stone was so uncool he voluntarily went to Vietnam instead of prowling around the Sunset Strip with the rest of his generation. Stone was such a nerd he became a soldier, a Real Man. He didn’t understand that in the 60’s real men were not soldiers. Stone’s heroes always wind up as victims, no matter how sleazy they are. Stone was asking everyone in connection with The Doors if Jim Morrison was impotent, and it makes you think Oliver Stone didn’t know much about Jim’s main disease. You’d think he’d at least read up on the symptoms that show up in a person who takes depressants as a cure for depression. Taking Seconal and Tuinal and drinking brandy will bring your sex life to a grinding halt. After his death in Paris, I began running into women who kept Jim alive–as did I–because something about him began seeming great compared to everything else that was going on. —Eve Babitz for Esquire Magazine (March, 1991)